FAMILY-OWNED BUSINESS: WHAT'S IT REALLY LIKE

People always ask me “How do you like working with your dad?”?

Talk about a loaded question!?

When people ask this question, they usually ask it with a smirk…??

There’s a stigma that family-owned business dynamics are more fragile than non-family run businesses, however, studies show that family-owned businesses are MORE profitable and last longer than other types of businesses. There’s a certain level of trustworthiness associated too because people have a transference of feeling between their own family and the family-owned business itself.?

During my senior year of college, my dad was wanting to start a new foodservice brokerage. He’d been in the industry with Food Sales West most of his career and they had recently gone through acquisitions to create Advantage Waypoint. After his 2-year contract ended at Advantage Waypoint, he was a free agent!?

As I approached the conclusion of my senior year, my dad came knockin’ on my door!?

He was ALL IN on starting a new food brokerage company. He had the itch to get back in the game, but for me, the foodservice industry was the LAST place I wanted to be. I had always respected my dad as a father, a coach, a mentor, and a best friend… But working together wasn’t something I’d ever envisioned.??And yet, we opened the doors to Portillo Sales & Marketing 6 days after my college graduation and the rest is history.?

Working with a parent is one of the most fulfilling and rewarding ventures a child can experience. Most of your life while you’re going to school and doing kid things, your parents are spending most of their waking hours at work. You develop a certain lens for them because when they go to work, you’re blind to what their life looks like.?

However, when you work with a parent, your perspective of them completely changes. You go from a Parent-Child relationship to an entirely new world of professionality. For the first time, I got to see my dad interacting with others in a professional setting… That was weird! He’d pick up the landline phone in our tiny office and make calls all day. When he was on his sales game, he was a freight train!?

What made our dynamic so strong was that he, as my senior with experience, was always open to feedback and he valued my opinion. From very early on, I felt like I had a voice and when I would make a decision, for better or for worse, he would let me put it in to action… This led to a lot of failure, but a crash course in being an entrepreneur.??

He taught me 3 Key Principles:?

1. Learn how to talk to adults: Fresh out of the classroom and into the boardroom, I was a babbling fool. It took a long time for me to learn this skill. But he knew if I didn’t have this skill as a young person in foodservice, my journey in this industry would be painful.?
2. Ditch the emails and text messages, and pick up the phone and make the call: This one was a brutal reality. As the true Millennial that I am, I hid behind the screen to communicate with others. I had no relationships and was trying to get appointments, but to no avail.??
3. No matter what, don’t ever give up: This he engrained in me day one. We had leveraged everything to make this company work and we never even had a Plan B in mind.??

A family business may not be for everyone, but one day when I look back on this journey together with my dad, I will be grateful for every moment of it.??

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